War in Ukraine: Applebaum Reminds of Stalin’s ‘Holodomor’

Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum in her book ‘War in Ukraine’ describes the Holodomor, or Holodomor (wiki), a horrific part of the history of Soviet Ukraine when nearly 4 million victims died of starvation under the regime of Joseph Stalin during 1932 and 1933, reports The Economist.

Of the estimated 70 million deaths caused by famine during the 20th century, at least 40 million victims lived under communist regimes in China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, and Cambodia.

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With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, scholars gained access to a series of historical documents, which reveal orders given by the Kremlin to create artificial famine. The book uncovers the case of the ‘Red Famine’ created by the authorities taking the last grain of wheat from starving peasants and preventing their escape from oppressed areas in search of food, not only in Ukraine.

The most harrowing passages of the book describe the moral degradation resulting from continuous hunger during the siege by Soviet authorities when starving peasants were forced to eat grass, animal skins, fertilizer, and each other. People became completely indifferent to the corpses lying in the streets, as well as to their own certain death.

Stalin actively sought to suppress information about the Holodomor in order to carry out his campaign of collectivization of Soviet agriculture unimpeded, which the author describes as a ‘revolution more shocking than the Bolshevik.’

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Applebaum is known for her books in which she sharply criticizes Stalin’s Gulag and the Sovietization of Eastern Europe after World War II. In her works, she also compares Stalin’s campaign to the one currently being conducted by Vladimir Putin. In her new book, she claims that the current political situation in Ukraine traces back to the period of the Red Famine.

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Stalin’s Holodomor of Ukrainian peasants was actually the third in a series of attempts to modernize the inherited agrarian order after the emancipation of serfdom in 1861 and the attempt to transform former serfs into small landowners carried out by Prime Minister Peter Stolypin in 1912. The Red Famine shows the terrible consequences of a campaign that attempted to eradicate Ukrainian nationalism, which the regime conducted ‘in a war with its own population.’